Even as people lap up mobile applications for stress management and healthy eating, making these have long-term effect has been a challenge. Bangalore, India, Sept. 23, 2015 - Dell Services has been selected by Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospital, India's leading eye-care specialty hospital chain with more than 50 hospitals, as its strategic partner to help define the chain's technology roadmap to drive operational efficiencies and improve productivity.

Through the partnership, Dell will provide Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospital a complete cloud-based IT solution that includes Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Hospital Information System (HIS) components to harness the power of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Dell will also provide global best practices and deep local business insight to help the hospital chain achieve its aggressive expansion plans to establish a separate line of optical businesses across India.

Dell launched the cloud-based solution last year exclusively for the India market. The solution seamlessly and cost effectively delivers integrated clinical and financial systems for healthcare providers. Deployed on a public cloud and accessible from anywhere, anytime, and on any device, the solution allows healthcare providers to quickly respond to increasing demands of branch expansion and system go-live without huge capital investments and long IT setup cycles.

"Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospital places great importance on continuously surpassing the expectations of its customers and making affordable healthcare a reality in India. We were looking for a technology partner to support our goal of being a global leader in eye care and found a perfect partner in Dell Services with their best-in-class healthcare domain knowledge and deep IT expertise. We believe that Dell's expertise will help us respond to changing technology and business needs, both in the short and long term. We were impressed by how Dell's solution could modularize our IT while enabling operational excellence and higher patient/customer satisfaction, which is the end goal of any healthcare provider," said Dr. Amar Agarwal, Chairman and Managing Director, Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospitals.

"We are proud to partner with Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospital, a pioneer in eye care specialty in India, on its transformation journey. Our cloud-based healthcare solution brings in the best-of-breed combination of HIS and ERP to help Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospital provide efficient, information-driven healthcare in an affordable way. We are very excited about this partnership," said Veera Raghavan, executive director and global practice head, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Dell Services.

Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospital first worked with Dell to develop an IT roadmap that aligned with their business plans. The roadmap began with a series of workshops that evaluated their current processes, challenges, pain points, and end-user expectations. From there a consulting engagement helped them evaluate and select the right combination of a cloud-ready HIS and ERP system based on Dell's analysis and findings.

Following the consulting engagement, Dr. Agarwal selected Dell's cloud-based solution. The solution encompasses UbQ Technologies' HIS for core hospital operations and NetSuite for financial reporting and consolidation, real time management reporting and analytics. The solution leverages Dell Boomi for seamless integration across the cloud platforms and will run on a Dell orchestrated Healthcare Community Cloud.

"The fragmented nature of the industry coupled with cost and quality sensitivities largely kept healthcare away from capital-intensive, transformational IT investments. As a result, operational maturity of this industry lagged early adopters such as banking and manufacturing. Cloud-based investments, in that sense, kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, cloud allows healthcare organizations to bridge the gap through increased speed of adoption. Secondly, due to its highly standardized and consumption-based pricing constructs, cloud allows organizations to adopt technologies such as ERP and HIS for a much lower cost, with the same efficiencies that are available to bespoke implementations," said Abhishek Singh, Practice Director, Everest Group, a global outsourcing advisory and research firm.

As a leader in the healthcare IT space for more than 20 years, Dell is routinely chosen by top customers to understand and identify the right solutions that help improve care, drive overall efficiency and manage financial risks.

Only in India the healthcare financing is very small when compared to the financing by the other forces rather than the patient himself or herself paying out of pocket. Having 70-75% of the expenses as out-of-pocket, in my opinion, is not a right approach to managing healthcare in a country where the patients tend to sub-optimally purchase healthcare if he/she has to pay out-of-pocket.